Thursday, June 25, 2009

DumpTruck is an open collaborative of artists founded by Cory Wagner, Mat Wolff, and Noelle Mason. In this performance, Wagner and Wolff will be divorcing themselves from "Trap," a sculpture located at BBAP. Please join us for a ceremony of engaged southern gentility.

That's supposed to be art? That monstrosity is so ugly! I'm more offended that that piece of garbage is exposed to the public.

i seen gang tagging that looked better than that crap

I wouldn't want that mural on my building. If ever vacant, she might have trouble ever renting the building because of it.-comments on ABC13

City Controller Annise Parker, used to using art to attack political opponents, is now the target of a political hit job by another mayoral candidate, Roy Morales. Using Reginald Adams' MOCAH mural on the side of a building Parker owns, Morales contends that the work is a conflict of interest for Parker. Oh yeah, both of them are running for mayor next year, and this is just the beginning of a full-on back-biting session slated to begin next spring. After Parker's participation in the Dolchefinko dust up over Houston Arts Alliance funds last year it was clear that she was against local money going to art projects- the production of the mural was funded by Waste Management, United Way of Greater Houston, CenterPoint Energy, AT&T, Chamberlin Roofing, JE Dunn and Texas Business Alliance- all people who would like to be on the good side of Parker should she be elected mayor.

This privately funded mural seems to be a great way to funnel influence to Parker, she gains altruistic advertising about the mural and there is no link between Parker and the funders if you don't pay attention to the details. Parker gets to make her point about publicly funded artwork being a wasteful sham by peddling her influence through art. Everybody happy yet?

It is unfortunately worse. That mural looks like an elementary school cafeteria. MOCAH calls themselves the "the city’s most prominent public art developer" and the mural "the first public art project in the city to honor Houston’s broad diversity" and both are total bull. At this rate Parker's pony MOCAH is leagues behind the HAA, ranking below GIVE UP and DUAL and slightly above the guy who writes GOD IS GREAT on bus stops.

The willing hypocrisy in this case is terribly fun, and I do hope that Morales gets to trip up Parker if for no other reason than her insistence (against all logic) that the mural is "not permanent". Hell, even MOCAH's site says that the mural is permanent. Parker is one of the architects of the late 90s ordinances that shut down the Westheimer Street Festival and attacked public spaces in Houston, she also claims to have "created a civic art program". A wink-wink nudge-nudge "donated" mural on the side of her building won't halt her ambitious bull run for the mayor's seat, but I sure as hell hope she doesn't get there.

After a sugar high comes the inevitable crash. It’s a lesson seldom learned by children, but apropos of all sorts of substance abuse that kid will encounter. A spring full of amazing exhibits this year has left me nowhere to go but down, and I have appropriately become irritable, sleepy and withdrawn. I’m scanning the horizon with bloodshot eyes as my hands start to shake and my brain feels tortured with anguish. Where will my next fix come from?

I’ve been to the Contemporary Arts Museum, but the Torsten Slama show makes me want to kick puppies. Seriously, the “What the fuck is this shit” quotient has to be exceedingly high for this exhibit; the plaintive landscapes with wonky Modernist buildings in anal-retentive exactitude and man-boy seduction scenes in pencil are so barren of emotion I was waiting for a warehouse fire or a rape scene. At the Blaffer Gallery, Existed: Leonardo Drew mashes both Robert Ryman-inspired exactitude and Bob Rauschenberg-style accumulations of detritus into dreary claptrap. Whatever cultural context Drew professes to illuminate is buried in the same sand that his head is in. Brent Steen’s drawings at Inman Gallery can’t even give enough to the viewer to be as dreary as Drew’s instead they come off as both lazy and uninspiring. Marlene Dumas’ massive show at the Menil Collection may have merit as postmodern portraiture, but unless you really get into it, they’re only going to make you depressed about South African racism, exploitation of women, heartbreak and dead babies.

Carlos Cruz-Diez’s installation of painted crosswalks is terribly pleasant to walk across, but the one-off nature of his project- confined to the street directly in front the Museum of Fine Arts- leaves me thinking that unless he went big and painted a whole neighborhood in them its just a navel-gazing exercise magnified by all the press this paint on the street has gotten. The Texas Sculpture Roundup at the Art Car Museum suffers from the opposite problem; the whole place is stuffed with large sculpture, but the presence of bad work with the good drags the whole show down. Where will it all end?!? I may jump in the bayou if this doesn’t get any better. Maybe the summer will kill me off; I’ll just lie in the sun all day, drinking salt water, slathered in baby oil, next to a pile of burning tires.